As marketing and selling strategy consultants, it is our job to help grow the revenue of our clients’ businesses. Many of our more entrepreneurial clients are not familiar with CRMs, and ask us what the best features for a CRM for small business may be.

This matters a lot to us, because we often get into supporting the clients’ sales team through regular participation in sales meetings. That means the client’s CRM – Customer Relationship Management software – which tracks all of the sales team’s activities, can make or break whether we have visibility to what is going on within the sales team.

Another reason we care about the effectiveness of a CRM is the fact that we need it to track the progress of the selling sequence. In other words, we help our clients by defining a customized sales training process, e.g. Step 1: Researching the prospect, Step 2: First Contact …etc… the process for turning a cold prospect into a paying customer. Ideally, each of these steps should be captured in the CRM. That way, you can see how far down the path each customer is and prioritize your activity.

Why Bother with a CRM?

If a salesperson leaves their job without having tracked their activities into a CRM along the way, almost all of the efforts they have made are lost forever. After all, a salesperson will only win maybe a couple of customers out of 100 attempts. If you have a CRM, you can pick up on the 100 attempts and bring many of them to fruition. You can also ensure the ball isn’t dropped on promises they made before they left if you can easily go through and see where things were left.

For this reason, I would always recommend getting the CRM up and running before you hire people in sales. That way, they’ll be in the habit of capturing everything from the beginning. If you hire first, and have a strong salesperson who records no activities, you’re stuck! Why? Because you won’t likely fire that person for not bothering with your CRM….getting it in place before they start gets you in the power seat before it’s too late!

What Features are Must Have

First, let’s start with the MUST HAVE features, as we see them:

• Data capture on the customer into various fields (contact information, personal notes, etc)
• Categorization of Business Types (so you can email certain kinds of industries, or sizes of customers, or lost customers both variable)
• Multiple Levels of Contacts within a Company
• Easy capture of call/email/SMS messages
• Ability to set out your sales process so you can see which prospects are at which stages
• Multi-level visibility (so managers see everyone’s activity, but not rep seeing other reps)
• Calendar integration – sets reminders to call someone again
• Integration with your Point-of-Sales system, so you can see purchase history of various accounts
• Ability to assign or move accounts to other reps
• Requires you to specify the source of the lead

Other Optional Features We Like

There are a few features we’d like to see, to make integration with marketing activities smoother:

• Integration with smart phones (an app version)
• Incoming leads from websites are fed into the system, and can tagged be in a “website” category
• Digital Ad responses also become leads, and can be in an “unqualified” category
• Tracking of which customers opened the e-newsletter
• Payment history (so you know if customers are paying their bills)

Other Parameters

There are three other major parameters that we care about: Price, Ease of Use and Quickness to Install.

• Price is a no-brainer. For a small business, they won’t want to pay more than $50/mo usually. Such fees are usually per user (salesperson) every month, which adds up fast.
• Ease of Use is the real kicker. Salespeople usually HATE using CRMs! It has to be as easy and intuitive as humanly possible – for putting in the information and for retrieving it. Never make a salesperson have to enter the same information twice, or it’ll just never happen.
• Finally the Quick Install. If you can get it up and running in a few days, without interrupting the business, you may have a winner. If you have your sales process well defined, this will make the roll-out much easier.

Our Favourite CRMs for Small Business?

While we have experience working with some of the larger CRMs, such as Salesforce and Hubspot, we’re currently in the process of doing a full review of the latest CRMs for small businesses, focusing on the low-cost options. We’ll be posting again soon with a full rundown. Stay tuned!

Or, if you have any comments on your most and least favourite CRM experiences, feel free to share them.